Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  Ephraim Bowen, twenty-seven at the time, was one of the first townsmen to heed the call. “About 9 o’clock,” Bowen said, he lit out for the meeting place, a well-known lodging house and tavern at the docks. “I took my father’s gun and my powder horn and bullets and went to Mr. Sabin’s, and found the southeast room full of people, where I loaded my gun, and all remained there till about 10 o’clock, some casting bullets in the kitchen, and others making arrangements for departure.”

  Finally word came, said Bowen. “Orders were given to cross the street to Fenner’s wharf and embark; which soon took place, and a sea captain acted as steersman of each boat.”

  If he harbored apprehensions as to what the adventure might bring, he did not record them. He noted only that the flotilla proceeded in tight, silent formation through the darkened waters until the shadow of the Gaspée loomed almost atop it, some fifty yards away.

  Despite the muffling of the oars, there was no masking the approach of eight longboats at such a distance. Abruptly, the sentinel on board the motionless Gaspée called into the night, “Who comes there?”

  But there was no answer. The sentry called again, but still no response came. There were the sounds of scurrying about the decks of the Gaspée, and moments later Lieutenant Dudingston, coatless, his shirt a pale glow in the darkness, appeared atop the starboard railing to hail the approaching party with a pistol in one hand and a cutlass in the other.

  “Who comes there?” the lieutenant’s voice rolled across the quiet waters this time. Still there was no answer.

  John Mawney, another Liberty Boy from Providence who had volunteered to join the assault as the party’s surgeon, listened intently. The men in his boat had filled it full of staves and paving stones, though no barrel making or street paving was intended on this voyage. Mawney was in the last boat, but he was close enough to hear when Captain Abraham Whipple, the assault party’s leader, finally broke the silence.

  “ Who comes there?” came the cry again from the motionless Gaspée, and this time, with his party fully assembled, Captain Whipple answered. “I want to come on board.”

  “Stand off,” was Captain Dudingston’s response. “You can’t come on board.”

  At that, Whipple blew up. “I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, God damn you. I have got a warrant to apprehend you, so surrender.”

  When Dudingston did not answer, Whipple made his fateful declaration: “I am come for the commander of this vessel, and have him I will, dead or alive.” At that he turned to the boats lined up beside him. “Men, spring to your oars.”

  At that moment, Joseph Bucklin, a man standing on the main thwart of one longboat, turned to Ephraim Bowen. “Ephe,” Bucklin said, “reach me your gun and I can kill that fellow.”

  Without hesitation, Bowen handed over his musket. Bucklin steadied himself, aimed at the white-shirted figure at the gunwale of the Gaspée, and fired. There was a groan, and Dudingston’s figure disappeared from atop the railing.

  Bucklin turned back to Bowen with satisfaction as the longboats surged forward. “I have killed the rascal,” he said, handing over the musket.

  In seconds, the longboats were alongside the Gaspée. If Bowen and the others in the assault party expected resistance, they did not encounter it. The terrified crew of the Gaspée were scattering like mice, fighting one another to make it through the entrance to the hold.

  As his longboat approached the Gaspée, surgeon Mawney spotted a rope hanging from the warship’s bow. He snatched hold and heaved himself off the deck, intending to pull himself aboard the Gaspée, but his hands slipped on the wet rope. Mawney felt himself hurtling down toward the waters beside the grounded ship.

  It was a short fall. Instead of a plunge into the depths, Mawney splashed to a jolting halt on the same sandbar that had seized the Gaspée, his knees scarcely touching the waterline. Mawney stared for a moment in surprise, then seized the rope more tightly and scrambled up over the gunwale and on board.

  A companion from the longboat tossed him a barrel stave, and Mawney, thinking himself to be the first of the assault party on board, turned to a sailor fumbling at the anchor windlass nearby. Mawney raised his stave and was about to bring it down on the skull of the sailor at the windlass when the man cried out, “John, don’t strike.”

  Mawney, recognizing it as the voice of Samuel Dunn, the captain of one of the other longboats in the party, froze in midswing. He and Dunn stood alone, watching the last of the Gaspée’s crew crowding down the hatchway toward the hold.

  Mawney strode quickly to the hatchway, calling after the frightened sailors. They had no reason to fear, he said. He ordered them to return on deck and bring some cord so that their hands could be tied. They’d be escorted to the nearby shore, he told them, but they would not be harmed.

  “They brought some tarred strings,” said Mawney, who then busied himself in the hatchway, tying up a pair of frightened British sailors. And that is when John Brown, the Providence merchant who had put the foray together, approached him somberly. The surgeon was needed up on deck immediately, Brown said, concern evident in his voice.

  When Mawney asked Brown what was wrong, the merchant glanced about before answering. “Don’t call names,” Brown said, “but go immediately into the cabin. There is one wounded, and will bleed to death.”

  Mawney made his way quickly to the ship’s cabin, where he found Lieutenant Dudingston reclining on the deck, a pool of blood spreading about the boards beneath him. Someone had covered him with a thin white woolen blanket, which Mawney quickly pulled aside.

  Someone handed Mawney a lantern, and the surgeon bent to examine the wounded officer. Dudingston had taken Joseph Bucklin’s shot in the left groin, Mawney saw, and the blood was pouring out freely. Thinking that Dudingston’s femoral artery was severed, Mawney pulled off his vest and tore his shirt from its collar to his waistband, intending to use it to stanch the bleeding.

  At that Dudingston raised a hand to stop him. “Pray, sir, don’t tear your clothes, there is linen in that trunk.”

  Following Dudingston’s gesture, Mawney turned to find none other than Joseph Bucklin standing beside the officer’s trunk. Mawney told him to break the trunk open and shred some of the linen there to make a compress. Bucklin managed to get the trunk open and find the linen, but as it was new, he could not manage to “lint” the fabric.

  Mawney held the heel of his hand pressed tightly to Dudingston’s wound while Bucklin fumbled at his task, and after a moment the surgeon called for his townsman to replace him at Dudingston’s side. The two quickly exchanged places, and while Bucklin did his best to stanch the bleeding of the man he had shot only minutes before, Mawney tore the linen into strips. If indeed Dudingston’s femoral artery was severed, a bandage would be of little help, but Mawney’s instincts as a doctor led him nonetheless.

  When he was ready, Mawney gave Bucklin the signal to lift his hand from Dudingston’s wound and the surgeon quickly applied the makeshift compress, then wrapped it tightly with strips of cloth. The three men stared down at Mawney’s handiwork, where an ooze of blood was already welling up. All that might have been done was done, each knew; from here it was up to the fates—and then the bleeding stopped.

  Fists were pounding on the cabin door now—they had been throughout the entire operation, in fact—and Mawney finally went to open it. There was a crowd of townsmen there, all of them clamoring for a chance at the officers’ liquor stores, some of which had been lifted from a Providence-bound sloop. “Many rushed in and attacked the bottles,” the disapproving Mawney reported. “I having boots on, stamped on them, and requested others to assist, which was readily done. During this, Mr. Dudingston was carried out of the room, and I never saw him after.”

  In the aftermath, the sailors aboard the Gaspée were given the opportunity to gather up their clothes and belongings, then were put ashore, along with the wounded Dudingston, at nearby Pawtuxet. Mawney, Bucklin, Bowen, and most of the others in the party were se
nt ahead toward home, while one boat remained behind for the leaders, including John Brown.

  They had not rowed far toward Providence, Mawney recalls, when a glow began to light the sky behind them. He turned to witness what they already guessed was happening: it was the Gaspée, timbers, masts, and sails ablaze, burning to the waterline.

  The following day, Lieutenant Governor Sessions sent an urgent message to Governor Wanton, informing him of what had taken place. “A very disagreeable thing has lately happened,” he began before providing a brief description of the events and explaining that he had already gone to see the unfortunate Lieutenant Dudingston at Pawtuxet.

  Sessions assured Dudingston that he would happily afford him money, surgeons, or removal to a more convenient place—anything that he might need—but the lieutenant declined, asking only that Sessions see that his sailors made their way safely to Boston or to the royal ship Beaver, stationed at Newport. When Sessions asked Dudingston if he would be willing to give a statement as to the true nature of the events, the lieutenant again declined. He would first have to make a report to his commanding officer, he explained, adding that “if he died, he desired it might all die with him.”

  Sessions added in his letter to Governor Wanton the depositions of two sailors who had been aboard the Gaspée at the time of the attack, their descriptions differing only slightly. The lieutenant governor closed by suggesting that the governor might wish to issue a proclamation quickly, offering a sizable reward for the apprehension of the persons responsible.

  Wanton took Sessions’s advice, “strictly charging and commanding all his majesty’s officers within the said colony, both civil and military, to exert themselves with the utmost vigilance to discover and apprehend the persons guilty of the aforesaid atrocious crime,” and offering a reward of £100. There soon came aggrieved letters from Admiral Montagu to Governor Wanton, urging him to expend every effort to find the culprits. The invading party, given the crew’s description of their dress, speech, and actions, were almost certainly all “gentlemen” from Providence, he added.

  Wanton assured both Montagu and his superiors in the Home Office that he would spare no effort in running the perpetrators to ground, though in his letter to the Earl of Hillsborough, the governor was quick to remind the secretary of state for the colonies that the actions of Dudingston and others had produced a most lamentable effect upon trade as well as the spirits of his constituents, thereby contributing to the affray.

  A month or so after the incident, with Dudingston on the mend, Admiral Montagu sent Wanton an affidavit from a sixteen-year-old slave who claimed to have been with the raiding party, identifying John Brown and several other members of the Sons of Liberty in Providence as the ringleaders. “I received the enclosed account,” Montagu told Wanton, “and, although it comes from a negro man, it carries with it the appearance of truth, as it agrees in many circumstances with Lieutenant Dudingston’s letter.”

  In turn, Wanton produced affidavits from the slave’s family members and his owner stating that the young man in question had not been off the plantation where he had been kept for more than a month bracketing the date of the incident, and that the affidavit produced by Montagu must necessarily be a forgery. Furthermore, Wanton told the admiral, his wish that the matter be adjudicated by the admiralty court had been rejected by the provincial court. The Gaspée, even if she had in fact been operating as a ship of His Majesty, had been thirty miles inside the entrance to Narragansett Bay when she ran aground, far from the “high seas.” The incident thus lay within the purview of the local authorities.

  The exchange marked the end of correspondence between the admiral and the governor, and though the Home Office would issue a proclamation offering a reward of as much as £1,000 for apprehension of the ringleaders or perpetrators, no one stepped forward to claim the prize. The frustrated and indignant Home Office finally appointed a rarely convened Royal Commission of Inquiry to meet at Newport and call all witnesses forward who might have knowledge of the matter. The five-person commission included Governor Wanton, along with the chiefs of the supreme courts of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey and the judge of the vice admiralty of Boston, though it was the last four (all staunch loyalists) who conducted most of the commission’s business.

  The group began its hearings early in January 1773 and continued work until late in June, and although it was successful in obtaining several accounts of the events that agreed substantially in the main, the members were, rather remarkably, unable to identify a single colonist who might have taken part in the melee. “After exerting ourselves to the utmost of our abilities,” the justices agreed, they were forced to admit failure.

  There was one witness, a sailor attached to the Gaspée, who had identified one participant by name, the justices allowed, but even that was not of much help: “Peter May, in his deposition, mentions one person only, by the name of Greene, whom he says he saw before on board the Gaspée; but the family of Greene being very numerous in this colony, and the said Peter not giving the Christian name or describing him in such a manner as he could be found out [May described “Greene” as a tall, slender man with brown hair], it is impossible for us to know at present the person referred to.”

  As to the contentions of Aaron Briggs, the young slave who claimed to have assisted in the assault on the Gaspée and who identified several Providence Liberty Boys by name, the commissioners were equally dubious. For one thing, whatever Briggs had told the British commander who had taken him into custody had probably been elicited by the commander’s threat to hang him from a yardarm if he didn’t tell everything he knew about the burning of the Gaspée. As they put it:

  Touching the depositions of Aaron, the negro, we humbly conceive it our duty to declare to your Majesty, that the conduct of Capt. Linzee tended too strongly to extort from a weak or wicked mind declarations not strictly true; that some parts of said depositions falsify others; that allowing the account he gave of the time he left the Island called Prudence, the place of his residence, on the night the Gaspée was burnt, and his return thither, to be true, or even near the truth, must render his being at the taking and destroying her, totally impossible, the distance being so great between Namquit Point and said Island. In addition to all which, there is full and satisfactory evidence to prove him, the whole of that night, to have been at home, and the request which he deposed was made him, to carry a person off said Island that night, and which he declared was the occasion of his going from home, proved on the examination of the very person, to be an absolute falsehood; and therefore we are most humbly of opinion, no credit is due to said Aaron’s testimony.

  Despite the Crown’s outrage and the lure of a veritable king’s ransom in reward, the Sons of Providence kept their counsel. Bowen and Mawney would live fifty years more before sharing their accounts, and in the meantime, the Gaspée’s demise would ignite another fire.

  ( 19 )

  Prelude to a Party

  Despite the ultimate failure of the Royal Commission of Inquiry to identify a single culprit responsible for burning the HMS Gaspée, colonists in Rhode Island were more than a bit apprehensive about the outcome when the hearings were first announced. Had any colonists been identified by the commission as having taken part in the affair, they would have been transported to England and tried on charges of treason, by decree of the king himself. “The civil magistrates and officers within our said Colony of Rhode Island, are entrusted with the power and authority to arrest and commit to custody such of the persons concerned in the plundering and destroying the Gaspee schooner,” read the king’s proclamation, “and in the inhuman treatment of our officer who commanded her, against whom any information shall lay, taken in order to the said offenders being sent to England to be tried for that offence.” The receipt of a death sentence under such circumstances was a very real possibility.

  When originally faced with the prospect, Lieutenant Governor Sessions wrote to Samuel Adams in late December 177
2, asking his advice on how best to proceed. On January 2, 1773, Adams answered, telling Sessions that he suspected that the Home Office was intent on revoking the rather liberal charter under which Rhode Island had operated from its inception. The convening of such an extraordinary court of inquiry with the power to send a colonist to Great Britain for trial was yet one more violation of the Constitution guaranteeing British subjects a right to trial by jury of their peers, he opined. “I have long feard that this unhappy Contest between Britain & America will end in Rivers of Blood,” he said, suggesting that indeed times were dire. Still, in Adams’s mind there was little Sessions could do. Perhaps Governor Wanton could attempt a postponement of the commission’s proceedings until he could confer directly with London. At the very least, Adams suggested, the Rhode Island Assembly ought to consider sending a circular letter to the other colonies detailing the threat in the matter, one that would “represent the Severity of your Case in the strongest terms.”

  Adams considered the maintenance of Committees of Correspondence, first employed during the Stamp Act crisis, as the most effective tool at the colonists’ disposal during this otherwise “quiet” period, and he quickly convinced the Boston Town Assembly to resurrect a twenty-one-person committee in November 1772. Governor Hutchinson at first pooh-poohed the enterprise. Sending letters of complaint back and forth, opined Hutchinson, “is such a foolish scheme that they must necessarily make themselves ridiculous.”

  However, when Hutchinson realized that Adams was being successful in encouraging the formation of such committees in most towns of consequence in the province, his tone changed from dismissal to complaint and finally to condemnation of a troubling theme that began to develop in the missives flying back and forth. Colonists were beginning to question the supreme authority of Parliament, he railed, and in an appearance before the assembly in early January 1773, he asserted that there could be no gray area in this matter. “I know of no line that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies,” he said.